Abstract

Recently, it has been argued that application of the weak gravity conjecture (WGC) to spin-2 fields implies a universal upper bound on the cutoff of the effective theory for a single spin-2 field. We point out here that these arguments are largely spurious, because of the absence of states carrying spin-2 Stückelberg U ( 1 ) charge, and because of incorrect scaling assumptions. Known examples such as Kaluza-Klein theory that respect the usual WGC do so because of the existence of a genuine U ( 1 ) field under which states are charged, as in the case of the Stückelberg formulation of spin-1 theories, for which there is an unambiguously defined U ( 1 ) charge. Theories of bigravity naturally satisfy a naive formulation of the WGC, M W < M Pl , since the force of the massless graviton is always weaker than the massive spin-2 modes. It also follows that theories of massive gravity trivially satisfies this form of the WGC. We also point out that the identification of a massive spin-2 state in a truncated higher derivative theory, such as Einstein-Weyl-squared or its supergravity extension, bears no relationship with massive spin-2 states in the UV completion, contrary to previous statements in the literature. We also discuss the conjecture from a swampland perspective and show how the emergence of a universal upper bound on the cutoff relies on strong assumptions on the scale of the couplings between the spin-2 and other fields, an assumption which is known to be violated in explicit examples.